Vyacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov (Russian: Вячесла́в Ива́нович Ива́нов, Italian: Venceslao Ivanov; 28 February [O.S. 16 February] 1866 – 16 July 1949) was a Russian poet, playwright, Classicist, and senior literary and dramatic theorist of the Russian Symbolist movement. He was also a philosopher, translator, and literary critic.
Born into the lower Russian nobility, the multilingual Ivanov studied Classics, philology, and philosophy. He married the sister of a school friend and aspired to live as a conventional family man, until he discovered the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche while in Rome. Following a surrender to their mutual attraction one night in the Colosseum, Ivanov left his wife and daughter for married Russian poet Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal. Following their Orthodox ecclesiastical divorces and clandestine remarriage in a Greek Orthodox ceremony at Livorno, Ivanov and Zinovieva-Annibal returned to their homeland and plunged headfirst into Tsarist Russia's literary bohemia.
For most of the remaining years of the Pre-1917 Silver Age of Russian Poetry, Ivanov presided over a weekly literary salon near the Tauride Palace in St. Petersburg. He helped discover the poet Anna Akhmatova and served as a highly influential teacher and mentor to philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, Symbolist poet and future Russian Orthodox martyr Maria Skobtsova, and Nobel Prize-winning poet and novelist Boris Pasternak.
Similarly to his contemporaries Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Max Reinhardt in the Germanosphere, Ivanov was a hugely influential avant garde dramatic theorist and sought, under the influence of Ancient Greek, Medieval, and Spanish Golden Age theatre, to blur and even to erase the fourth wall and make the audience into participants in the dramas they attended. The radically innovative theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold is only one of those who has been enormously influenced by Ivanov's dramatic philosophy.
Following the First World War, the October Revolution, the Russian Civil War, and his 1924 emigration from the Soviet Union to Fascist Italy, Ivanov converted in 1926 to the Russian Greek Catholic Church, which remains one of the smallest of the Eastern Catholic Churches. Ivanov had previously lived a life so hedonistic that he later compared his conversion in a work of Russian poetry to that of St. Augustine.
In 1931, Ivanov successfully defended Christianity in a public debate against Benedetto Croce, which enormously bolstered his intellectual reputation in the West. Ivanov spent the remainder of his life in Rome as a professor at both the Pontifical Oriental Institute and the Russicum, where his students included future Martyrs and confessors under Stalinism Bishop Theodore Romzha, Fr. Pietro Leoni, and Fr. Walter Ciszek. His close friends as a refugee included Martin Buber, Sir Isaiah Berlin, Sir Maurice Bowra, and Charles Du Bos.
Since his death in 1949, Ivanov's writing has been praised and referenced by Pope John Paul II, who often referenced Ivanov's metaphor about Roman and Byzantine Christianity representing the two lungs of Christendom. Furthermore, after decades of his writings being banned by government censorship in his homeland, Ivanov has witnessed a great revival of interest since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Born in Moscow, Ivanov lost his father, a minor civil servant, when he was only five years old and was subsequently raised within the Russian Orthodox Church by his deeply religious mother. He graduated from the First Moscow Gymnasium with a gold medal and entered Moscow University where he studied history and philosophy under Sir Paul Vinogradoff. In 1886, he moved to Berlin University to study Classics, Roman law, and economics under Theodor Mommsen. During his stay in Imperial Germany, he absorbed the poetry and philosophy of German Romanticism, most notably as represented by Novalis, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Goethe. Ivanov's main passionate interest, however, was in researching the connection between the Greek religious cult of Dionysus and his worship during the Bacchanalia with the creation of the theatre of ancient Greece.
In 1886 Ivanov married Darya Mikhailovna Dmitrievskaya, the sister of his close childhood friend Aleksei Dmitrievsky. From 1892 he studied archaeology in Rome, completing his doctoral dissertation there. In 1893 he met Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal, a well-to-do amateur singer, poet, and translator, who had recently separated from her husband. Through their shared descent from 17th-century Afro-Russian military officer and aristocrat Abram Petrovich Gannibal, Lidia was also a distant relation of Russian national poet Alexander Pushkin.
Influenced by his recent discovery and enthusiasm for the philosophical writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Ivanov and Zinovieva-Annibal surrendered to their mutual attraction, "during a tempestuous night at the Colosseum, which he described in verse as a ritualistic breaking of taboos and regeneration of ancient religious fervor."
In 1895, Ivanov's wife and daughter separated from him almost immediately and, on 15 April 1896, Lidia gave birth to Ivanov's second daughter, who was named Lidia, after her mother.
Both wronged spouses were easily granted Orthodox ecclesiastical divorces, under the terms of which Viacheslav Ivanov and Lidia Zinovieva-Annibal were ruled the guilty parties and were accordingly forbidden a Russian Orthodox wedding. Making use of a common dodge at the time, Ivanov and Lidia dressed in Ancient Greek religious costumes deliberately reminiscent of the cult of Dionysus and were married in a Greek Orthodox ceremony at Livorno in 1899.
Despite the rejection of Christian morality represented by both the adulterous beginning of his relationship with Lidia and their decision, similarly to many other members of Tsarist Russia's literary bohemia, to have an open marriage, Ivanov would paradoxically recall, "Through each other we discovered ourselves - and more than ourselves: I would say that we found God."
They first settled in Athens, then moving to Geneva, and making pilgrimages to Egypt and Palestine. During that period, Ivanov frequently visited Italy, where he studied Renaissance art. The rugged nature of Lombardy and the Alps became the subject of his first sonnets, which were heavily influenced by the medieval poetry of Catholic mystics.
At the turn of the 20th century, Ivanov elaborated his views on the spiritual mission of Rome and the Ancient Greek cult of Dionysus. He summed up his Dionysian ideas in the treatise The Hellenic Religion of the Suffering God (1904), which traces the roots of literature in general and, following Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, the art of tragedy in particular to ancient Dionysian mysteries. This was because, similarly to his hero Vladimir Soloviev, Ivanov, "understood Nietzsche as a Christian thinker in spite of himself. This explains why he applies New Testament concepts to Nietzsche's fundamentally anti-Christian worldview."
With the assistance of both his ex-wife and the poet and philosopher Vladimir Soloviev, Ivanov's first collection, Lodestars, was published in 1903. It contained many of his pieces written a decade earlier and was praised by the leading critics as a new chapter in Russian Symbolism. The poems were compared to Milton's and Trediakovsky's on account of their detached, calculated archaism. Similarly to his contemporary T.S. Eliot, Ivanov drew heavily, according to literary scholar Robert Bird, upon, "epigraphs from a host of languages ... and in a variety of alphabets", while also experimenting, "in grafting Classical Greek metres and syntax onto Russian verse", and revelling, "in obscure archaisms and recondite allusions to antiquity."
After capturing the attention of Russian Symbolist poet Valery Bryusov while delivering a series of lectures on the cult of Dionysus at a short-lived Russian University in Paris in 1903, in 1905 Vyacheslav and Lidia Ivanov made their triumphant return to St Petersburg, where they were much lionized as foreign curiosities. They set up a literary salon known as "Среды Иванова" (Ivanov Wednesdays, better known as "On the Tower", from its location).